Saturday, April 29, 2006

It's Blair's fault

E-mails sent to Tory Rob Wilson by a senior officer complained that his force got "no support" from the Immigration Service in removing serious offenders from the country...

The officer said that the service "needs to work with us and not against us and remove people who are overstayers, entered the country through illegal means or commit crime.

"I cannot emphasise enough the massive problem there is in Reading with illegal immigrants and the lack of removal by the immigration service."

In another e-mail, Mr Wilson was told there was "a general reluctance" for immigration officers to attend to anything other than failed asylum seekers "as this is the current government performance indicator"...

Mr Wilson also revealed that an immigration service worker had told him there was an informal ban on dealing with prisoners.

The claim came in a letter to the MP that claimed: "Immigration Officers have been forbidden from going out on operations or to deal with immigration offenders arrested in police stations unless they are FASes (failed asylum seekers).

"Personnel are under instruction not to get involved in assisting the police with offenders unless they are to pick up FASes."

That was to meet priority targets of increasing the numbers of failed asylum seekers being deported, the letter said.

And why does the Immigration Service have to concentrate its limited resources on failed asylum seekers at the expense of dealing with criminal foreign nationals? Here are a few clues:

Tony Blair today admitted his government needs to go further to tackle the backlog of failed asylum seekers, following a hard-hitting report published which warned the situation was "extremely serious".

Everything has been geared towards making good on Precious Princess Tony’s asylum promises, and even there the government has failed. The rest of the system has broken down. Foreign nationals who shouldn’t be in this country are out on the streets, committing serious crimes. A monkey could’ve done a better job at the Home Office than Charles Clarke, but it’s the organ grinder who is really at fault.

The IND needs more resources so it can deal with ALL of its problems, and there's a simple solution. The Home Office should abandon its ludicrous ID card scheme and redirect some of that vast sum of money to where it is really needed. Of course, backing down on ID cards would make Tony look bad so it isn’t going to happen.

One of the men who raped and murdered Mary-Ann Leneghan should not have been in this country, and yet Blair and his inner circle say they can't see what all the fuss is about. They should take a look in a mirror.